MySQL: InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is [number]

One of the mysql database servers I manage started to have issues with doing backups yesterday. mysqldump was running but nothing was happening on the backup side. I started to investigate to see why our full backups were failing. I opened up the mysql error log file (mine is at: /usr/local/mysql/var/hostname.err) and notice there were many instances of following error.

070815 15:31:46 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 9433957,
InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498.
InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the
InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the
InnoDB: largest such row.

I poked around and found out our log files were set to default (5 mb) and they needed to be increased. After doing some calculations and research, I decided going to 50 mb at this point would be a good way to go. So I made the change in my.cnf file and added: innodb_log_file_size = 50M

I then stopped our mysql server and restarted it. And to my horror I saw following error messages show up in the mysql error logs:

I stopped the mysql server right away. I then remember, by help of a friend, that I have to remove the old log files if I change the size by changing innodb_log_file_size. So I issued a command: mv ib_logfile? ..

This command moves both ib_logfile1 and ib_logfile2 down one directory. I didn’t want to just remove ‘em so instead I moved them. After that, I restarted mysql again and to my comfort, everything came back up without errors. So lesson learned: if you change ib_logfile size by using innodb_log_file_size setting, make sure you move existing log files before you start mysql again.

————————————-DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.

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Also note that there is the innodb_fast_shutdown setting. If activated, the logs don’t get applied upon shutdown, so be sure to disable it before changing logfile size or touching the logfiles in any way.